>> I disagree. This seems to me to be adopting the Microsoft policy of doing >> the user's thinking for them: "I don't care what they want - we know >> what's best for them." If a person wants to have "foo" and "foo.exe" in >> the same directory, that should be allowed. A few times getting tripped >> up by the wrong thing executing will be a good life lesson for the person, >> and teach about how different operating systems work to boot. Should I >> create "foo" as an executable, and "foo.exe" exists, then if I want to run >> "foo.exe", I should have to call it out specifically. I can see this >> might cause some confusion should, unbeknownst to the user, "foo.exe" >> exists earlier in the path than "foo", but that would become an >> education on how to use the PATH variable. This confusion arises >> from Cygwin's kowtowing to Microsoft's dubious idea of using extensions to >> control the handling of files. > >If you took away Cygwin's .exe extension handling and just relied on >file permissions like Unix, then using Cygwin tools from a cmd.exe >prompt would become problematic. > >Windows wants that .exe (or .bat or .cmd or .msi, etc) extension and >doesn't give a whip if you chmod a file's permissions +x. Without an >extension, Windows has no idea what to do with the file. > >That's fine if you never do anything with Cygwin commands outside of a >Cygwin shell, but I don't think this is a globally desirable >behaviour. >
Just a question: Shouldn't it be up to the user to determine how a file is to be used, and name the file accordingly? If the file is to used only in a Cygwin environment, leave the extension off is desired. If the file is to used in both a Cygwin and a Windows environment, add an extension (like ".sh" or ".exe" or whatever is needed). It is easy enough to teach Windows how to recognize what to do with a new extension (like ".sh"). I am just against operating systems making decisions for the user, or restricting him/her unnecessarily. And, yes, I know that this happens all the time... Phil Rising risin...@nationwide.com -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
